Come the Revolution

Archive for the ‘Books!’ Category

We received a copy of this book — an original edition, no less — as a gift from friends last week. I found this passage especially lovely:

There is no home like the farm home. And with the incomparable charm of rural home life comes the infinite pleasure of creative effort and the exhilaration of contending with nature and winning bread from the bare ground. There are a constancy and a stability about it all. There is something to build on, something to look forward to in the years to come. [. . . ] Some people in the cities have an idea that farm work is not an “elevating” occupation, but I want to say to you, my friends, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, that agriculture is one of the most dignified employments in which a man can engage.

-Edward Owen Dean, Opportunities in Farming

A few months back I read an amazing book. It’s called Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll. The reading is relatively dense, but it’s filled with history and an expert analysis of the conversations of the earlier half of the 19th Century with regard to improving soils through on-farm natural means versus taking what one could from a plot. Essentially the entire book is about manure either directly or indirectly. I realize this won’t excite so many people (and of those it would, Freud or Kraft-Ebbing would have had quite a bit of fun with you).

Since the time of Washington, if not before, there have been serious, voiced concerns of the lessening fertility of American soils. Without fertile soil, tilled in perpetuity, argued many men of that time through today, civilization loses its footing. Many farmers of the time “prefer[ed] to rethink agriculture rather than remake their world on the frontier” where the soils were more fertile.

“At the center of these concerns stood a pile of dung. Unattractive and strange to the uninitialized but a stern monument to those who knew its ways, dung held great power. If improvement and all that it stood for had a single symbol, it was this—the steaming excrement that completed a circle in the land large enough to enclose the riches of rural life, strong enough to make the farm equal in strength to the changes taking place in the upstart sectors of the post-1812 economy. If the farm would stand with manufacturing or against it, one thing was certain: it would have to make manure. And to those who claimed that the glory of the United States lay in the West and that the unceasing exploitation of soil would result in a prosperous nation, the dunghill argued otherwise. Onto this single hot and aromatic structure improvers heaped all their hopes and goals: a permanent rural society, the leadership of responsible elites, a countryside distinguished for its beauty and neatness, the application of reason to artifice, and various desires for integration or isolation from the wider world all of it seemed possible when dung got mixed up with soil. The dunghill seemed to offer a way out of the paradox of a declining environment that would provide the raw material for an economic revival. At the moment they realized that agriculture had resulted in widespread degradation, farmers all over Atlantic America came to believe that the same soil could bear a great deal of economic and political weight.”

How could you argue with that?

Larding the Lean Earth has led to a few more books on my bookshelf (albeit mostly temporarily from the public library) about manure and humanure or night soil (the polite names for human feces when it becomes productive waste). They have all been interesting, but none as historically significant and humbling as Larding the Lean Earth. In the hopes that I will write about all of them, consider this Poop Post 1.

Lydia Marie Child’s American Frugal Housewife is a classic of 19th century industry and morality. Child was an early feminist and abolitionist steeped in the Transcendentalist movement, and much of her advice to young, less-than-wealthy housewives still rings true today. I picked up a copy while at Sturbridge Village this summer, even though I’m no housewife and, frankly, Cian’s the frugal American in this household. Here are some of Child’s more salient points.

Time is money.

The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time as well as materials.

I’m guessing there was nary an idle hand in the Child household. While it’s no longer economical to knit our own stockings in between other tasks, we can still make use of time when our hands or minds would be otherwise unoccupied by knitting for gifts or charity while watching TV or learning a useful language while walking or taking public transportation (or driving, if you can still afford that).

Live well within your means.

No false pride, or foolish ambition to appear as well as others, should ever induce a person to live one cent beyond the income of which he is certain. If you have two dollars a day, let nothing but sickness induce you to spend more than nine shillings; if you have one dollar a day, do not spend but seventy-five cents; if you have half a dollar a day, be satisfied to spend forty cents.

Well would you look at Mrs. Child, preaching the dangers of a credit economy in 1828. She’s right, though. Modern-day frugalists advise us to put away 10% of our earnings which, depending on how much (or how little) you make, may seem to add up v e r y s l o w l y. A more dramatic an adventurous savings method for the seriously committed couple is to live entirely off of one partner’s earnings, and put the other’s directly into savings.

Pick up your twine and paper.

In this family, when the father brought home a package, the older children would, of their own accord, put away the paper and twine neatly [. . . .] If the little ones wanted a piece of twine to play scratch-cradle, or spin a top, there it was, in readiness; and when they threw it upon the floor, the older children had no need to be told to put it again in its place. [. . .] The other day, I heard a mechanic say ‘I have a wife and two little children; we live in a very small house; but, to save my life, I cannot spend less than twelve hundred a year.’ Another replied ‘You are not economical; I spend but eight hundred.’ I thought to myself– ‘Neither of you pick up your twine and paper.’

There are limits to how much twine and paper you can pick up when you live in a (frugally) small space, but this hint has served Cian and I well. He saves plastic utensils from the occasional take-out meal to bring with his brown bag lunch, and I wash and save the tubs that soft cheeses come in to store my own yogurt cheese in. Ah, plastic: the modern day twine and paper.

An apple a day. . .

Avoid the necessity of a physician, if you can, by careful attention to your diet. Eat what best agrees with your system, and resolutely abstain from what hurts you, however well you may like it.

Doctors are expensive (and also, in case you hadn’t noticed, the sky is blue). Stay healthy by exercising, eating well, and maintaining proper hygiene (and by walking carefully down stairs) and, hopefully, you’ll save on doctors bills. Knowing how to deal with everyday illnesses at home is also useful, and Child provides a fairly extensive list of remedies. You might want to rely on something a little more recent.

Choose your lot.

Says Germanicus, ‘There is my dunce of a classmate has found his way into Congress, and is living amid the perpetual excitement of intellectual minds, while I am cooped up in an ignorant country parish, obliged to be at the beck and call of every old woman, who happens to feel uneasy in her mind.’

‘Well, Germanicus, the road to political distinction was as open to you as to him; why did you not choose it?’

‘Oh, I could not consent to be the tool of a party; to shake hands with the vicious, and flatter fools.’

Since Germanicus is wise enough to know the whistle costs more than it is worth, is he not unreasonable to murmur because he has not bought it?

Could you be earning more money than you are now? I could be, if I was willing to make certain sacrifices. I tried that; it made me an unhappy person. So I elected to do what makes me happy, for less money. We’re still comfortable, paying our debts and putting money into savings, but things are definitely tighter. But you won’t hear me complain: I’ve chosen my lot. Not all of us have the luxury of choice, but to the best of our ability we should choose what makes us happy, whether that’s a fat bank account or more leisure time or even (perish the thought!) goats, and then get down to the business of living well.

“Camels eat grass; grass needs water. So did their masters’ crops, whose bounty begat a population boom of humans. More humans needed more herds, pasture, fields, and more water—all just at the wrong time. No one could have known that the rains had shifted. So people an their flocks range farther and grazed harder, assuming that the weather would return to what it had been, and that everything would grow back the way was.
It didn’t. The more they consumed, the less moisture transpired skyward and the less it rained. The result was the hot Sahara we see today. Only it used to be smaller:Over this past century, the numbers of Africa’s humans and their animals have been rising, and now temperatures are, too. This leaves the precarious sub-Saharan tier of Sahel countries at the brink of sliding into the sand.”

Alan Weisman wrote this in his book The World Without Us, which provides not only a view of the constructive destruction the Earth would offer human structures should humans disappear (say, were we wiped out by a deadly virus) but also a history of the world from archaeological, anthropological, botanical, and agricultural standpoints. As a nerd, this book is completely engaging- I felt as though my knowledge of the world was expanding simultaneously in every direction. It engaged every aspect of my knowledge and comprehension of the world.

It was also refreshing, and terrifying. Refreshing knowing the earth would reclaim much of the surface damages caused by humans within a few hundred years. Terrifying that it could not reclaim all of the damages.

When I first read Better Off, Eric Brende’s memoir of 18 months in an Anabaptist community, I was left dissatisfied.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the book. I found it entertaining and full of food for thought, and I’m a sucker for any book that gives me a glimpse into another culture. Still, I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to. It just didn’t resonate.

So when I saw that Cian had posted a review of the book, I decided to give it another read and see if it improved with time.

I read the book over the past week, mostly while traveling by plane and train (but not on the bus, which makes me sick). I felt a little silly reading a book about “flipping the switch on technology” while playing the part of the jet-set traveler. Brende approaches his lifestyle experiment from a philosophical standpoint — in fact, it was the subject of his master’s thesis for MIT’s Science, Technology and Society program — and the hint we get of his critical analysis of our use of technology is enough to make it clear that he’s really, really thought about this stuff.

But Better Off isn’t a master’s thesis. Instead, it’s a look at the reality of a life with less technology. In some ways, it’s obvious: if we didn’t have electric lights, we’d go to bed earlier and feel a lot less tired when the time came to get up and milk the cows. Other realizations, like the strengthening effect of limiting technology on community, were more enlightening.

In one remarkable passage, Brende concludes that even the community’s limited technology might be too much. While threshing wheat destined for animal feed, he realizes that his neighbors wouldn’t even need so many horses if they weren’t harvesting so much wheat — and they wouldn’t need so much wheat if they weren’t feeding so many horses. They were just, as one local put it, “turning the machine.”

I was most of the way through the book before I realized why I’d been dissatisfied the first time. In his review, Cian mentioned the apparent ease with which Brende and his wife Mary fell into traditional gender roles in their new home, despite Mary’s professed desire not to be backed into “women’s work.” When he discusses their division of labor, Brende brushes away Mary’s concerns nonchalantly:

“She was perfectly happy puttering around the house; what had bothered her in her youth was less domesticity than the feeling it had been artificially imposed upon her.”

In the passage that follows, Brende comes home from his work hungry and finds that Mary hasn’t made dinner. They have an argument, and Mary shows more personality in those short paragraphs than in any of the other 230 pages.

And that, I finally realized, was why I felt so dissatisfied with the book the first time around. Brende paints his neighbors to life with words, while his wife and co-conspirator is left entirely two dimensional. What an experience this must have been for her! What was she thinking all that time? I won’t spoil any surprises, but some pretty serious stuff happens for Mary during their stay — and we don’t hear at all how she felt about it. Brende’s character-treatment of his wife makes her little more than an obedient helpmate, the sidekick to his hero adventure. I hope that, if Cian ever writes a book, he’ll portray me as a real person with depth and personality, and not just a backdrop.

So yeah, that was a bummer. Overall, Better Off is a quick and interesting read with implications for the way we live our lives, wherever we are. Are you running the machine, or is it running you?

Photo by Cindy47452.

I’ll admit, I’m an addict. Just about everywhere I go I take some reading material. I’m not just talking the standard newspaper-on-the-can bit. I have books with me all the time. In fact, we’ve run out of space in this apartment for my and Amanda’s collective book collections- and these are just the ones we have <i>with</i> us. Lately I’ve been reading ravenously- trying to alternate between scary/serious and novels (which are often serious in their own right, but faster to read). I’m trying to make myself write reviews for the books in my collection that are relevant to this blog. If you have something you’d like to review in kind, please e-mail us. We want guest writers!

Ok, enough of this banter- time to get down to business. Today’s business is Better Off. It’s the true story of a young couple who moved from urban Boston, one having just received a Masters degree from MIT, to an Anabaptist community in the Mid-West. Eric and Mary, newly wed at the time, stumble through 18 months of living with no electricity or other “time saving devices”. They had never lived lives like that before- no phone, no running water, no lightswitches, no office jobs or outside income (they kept the indoor toilet and flushed it, likely with greywater). Neither had ever lived on a farm, either- which leads to some interesting moments throughout the first growing season they are there.

The book was interesting for me because I felt a sense of identification with Eric as he tries to assimilate to the degree appropriate into a religious community that he feels he can learn a great deal from, which is also a community of manual laborers who have lived with relatively little outside world connections. His and Mary’s interests largely match mine and Amanda’s, which made it easier for me to pick up the book. I believe his writing style is accessible enough and his drive toward this project (living at the relative other end of the technological continuum) popular enough to be relatively easy reading for anyone interested in this blog.

There is nothing perfect in life, and Eric Bende’s book is not different in that regard. Mary and Eric soon settle into a “men’s work/women’s work” dichotomy when they get to the farm that I have since had a few pointed conversations about. Some of the things they stumble over seem, at least from my comfortable distance, as a sign they weren’t as prepared as they could have been for their sojourn into a life of relative simplicity- something that bothers me in strange ways as I read such books. There is also a strong concentration on their first 6 months or so, with a condensed version of the rest of their stay (which was 18 months and not 12 as the cover suggests).

All in all a really enjoyable read, and one that I recommend you borrow from your local library or favorite blogger.

Last month I succumbed on more than a few occasions to a cumpulsion for buying used books. I know, it’s not as worthwhile as the library. I wish it were ossible for me to access all the books I want from the library, but DC’s library system is less than efficcient. These books I purchased were often for others, but one I bought with the purpose of reading and finding out from its contents whom it best fit.

This book is How to Live Well Without Owning a Car by Chris Balish. As someone who lives well and does not want a car, I was a bit of an easy sell on this book. His descriptions of gasoline-powered-mentality [my term, not his] were eerily similar to some of the things I still feel occasionally- those vehicles are enormously helpful in terms of getting around, especially outside of densely populated metropolitan areas. Even I lust after gasoline-powered vehicles, although those tend to be two-wheeled or plug-in hybrids.

Balish has a writing style that’s easy to read and has a lot of information I am glad someone [other than myself] put together. He references the US Bureau of Labor’s statistical analysis from 2003’s average amount spent on car ownership that year (when the average gallon of gas was $1.55) as $8′410. He even provides a worksheet so you can figure out the “true financial cost” of your own vehicle. The idea of owning a car with that kind of financial breakdown is nearly as terrifying as the amount of pollution from the manufacture and function of one. Almost.

The book has a lot of good suggestions for minimizing your reliance on automobiles through public transport and biking among other means. If you’re interested in becoming less codependent in your relationship with your automobile, or end the relationship entirely, I highly recommend this book.

The beginning and end seem to be available via GoogleBooks, in case you can’t wait till your weekly trip to the library.